6 Delicious Breakfast-Themed Beers

It's probably not wise to drink beer with breakfast, but if you are going to enjoy a delicious brew first thing in the morning, grab something appropriately themed. From coffee-flavored porters to cereal-inspired ales, here are six breakfast-themed beers to check out.

1. TOASTER PASTRY INDIA-STYLE RED ALE // 21ST AMENDMENT

As a nod to its northern California brewery’s former life as a Kellogg’s factory churning out Pop Tarts, 21st Amendment created a red ale flavored with biscuit malts, intended to impart a buttery crust flavor. In spite of the biscuit malts and fruity notes, for those with unsophisticated palates (casual beer-drinkers of the world, unite), it doesn’t really taste like a Pop Tart. It is, however, still a delicious beer. And would go great with an actual Pop Tart.

2. BOMB! // PRAIRIE ARTISAN ALES

There are plenty of coffee-infused beers out there—Rogue recently teamed up with Stumptown for a Cold Brew IPA, Goose Island creates a different Intelligentsia-powered stout annually (the last one also involved bourbon), and Sam Adams just came out with a Nitro Coffee Stout—but if you have to try just one, check out the Oklahoma-based Prairie Artisan Ales' Bomb!, an Imperial Stout that has a Beer Advocate rating of 99 (that’s out of 100) and was named Gear Patrol’s “hands-down favorite” coffee beer out of a field of 18. It’s aged with espresso beans, chocolate, vanilla, and ancho chiles.

3. CEREALIOUSLY FRENCH TOAST CRUNCH // BLACK BOTTLE BREWERY

The brewery comes out with different versions of its Cerealiously beers seasonally. The upcoming brew, launching this month, is a milk stout fermented with French Toast Crunch for a "roasty-sweet" flavor, according to the brewery. If French Toast Crunch doesn’t suit your palate, they brew a Count Chocula beer every October. And until April, they’re taking votes for which delicious cereal to brew with next.

4. VOODOO DOUGHNUT MANGO ASTRONAUT ALE // ROGUE

The Oregon-based brewers at Rogue Ales and Spirits teamed up with Portland’s most famous doughnut shop, Voodoo Donuts, to bring one of Voodoo’s quirky pastries, the Mango Tango, to life in draught form. While mangoes, doughnuts, and malt may seem like a lot of flavors to handle together, the ale pulls the combination off—as long as you’re down with your beer being on the sweet side.

5. D’OH NUT BEER // AGAINST THE GRAIN

Louisville, Kentucky’s Against the Grain Brewery paired up with the nearby Hi-Five Doughnuts to create a beer-doughnut mashup lace with brown sugar, vanilla glaze, and smoked vanilla. They describe it as a Root Beer Doughnut Rachbier. It’ll only be around for a limited run, so get yourself to Louisville now.

AND MORE …

If you spot a breakfast beer, don’t hesitate! Most are only around for a limited time. Last summer, Wheaties teamed up with Minnesota’s Fulton Brewery to create HefeWheaties, a limited-edition Hefeweizen inspired by the iconic orange-boxed cereal and sold in the Minneapolis area. And though most brewers have stayed away from meat-flavored breakfast beers, Dogfish Head debuted the scrapple-flavored Beer for Breakfast at their Delaware brewpub in late 2014 (reviewers reported it tasted mostly like coffee). It's possible that there just wasn’t enough demand for pork mush beer to keep it year-round.

All yeast breads contain some amount of alcohol. Have you ever smelled a rising loaf of bread or, better yet, smelled the air underneath dough that has been covered while rising? It smells really boozy. And that sweet smell that fresh-baked bread has under the yeast and nutty Maillard reaction notes? Alcohol.

However, during the baking process, most of the alcohol in the dough evaporates into the atmosphere. This is basically the same thing that happens to much of the water in the dough as well. And it’s long been known that bread contains residual alcohol—up to 1.9 percent of it. In the 1920s, the American Chemical Society even had a set of experimenters report on it.

Anecdotally, I’ve also accidentally made really boozy bread by letting a white bread dough rise for too long. The end result was that not enough of the alcohol boiled off, and the darned thing tasted like alcohol. You can also taste alcohol in the doughy bits of underbaked white bread, which I categorically do not recommend you try making.

Putting on my industrial biochemistry hat here, many [people] claim that alcohol is only the product of a “starvation process” on yeast once they run out of oxygen. That’s wrong.

The most common brewers and bread yeasts, of the Saccharomyces genus (and some of the Brettanomyces genus, also used to produce beer), will produce alcohol in both a beer wort
and in bread dough immediately, regardless of aeration. This is actually a surprising result, as it runs counter to what is most efficient for the cell (and, incidentally, the simplistic version of yeast biology that is often taught to home brewers). The expectation would be that the cell would perform aerobic respiration (full conversion of sugar and oxygen to carbon dioxide and water) until oxygen runs out, and only then revert to alcoholic fermentation, which runs without oxygen but produces less energy.

Instead, if a Saccharomyces yeast finds itself in a high-sugar environment, regardless of the presence of air it will start producing ethanol, shunting sugar into the anaerobic respiration pathway while still running the aerobic process in parallel. This phenomenon is known as the Crabtree effect, and is speculated to be an adaptation to suppress competing organisms
in the high-sugar environment because ethanol has antiseptic properties that yeasts are tolerant to but competitors are not. It’s a quirk of Saccharomyces biology that you basically only learn about if you spent a long time doing way too much yeast cell culture … like me.

Even if you can’t list the ingredients in a Moscow Mule, you may be able to recognize one from across a bar: The simple combination of vodka, lime juice, and ginger beer is traditionally served in a copper mug. But that trendy vessel could pose a serious health threat, according to public health officials. As CBS News reports, the potential for food poisoning from those iconic cups is severe enough that the state of Iowa is taking a stand against them.

Copper is commonly used to make kitchenware like pots and pans, but when it comes into contact with certain foods, it can be unsafe. Foods and liquids that have a pH lower than 6.0, and are therefore acidic, can erode the copper and copper alloys and cause them to mix with whatever’s being consumed. The pH of lime juice falls between 2.0 and 2.35 [PDF], so the chances of copper contamination from a Moscow Mule sloshing inside a copper mug all night are high.

Symptoms of copper poisoning include vomiting, abdominal pain, diarrhea, and yellow skin or jaundice. Even if you feel fine after a night of Moscow Mule imbibing, long-term effects like liver damage can occur over time. In response to these hazards, Iowa’s Alcoholic Beverages Division released a statement [PDF] advising against the use of Moscow Mule mugs. “The recent popularity of Moscow Mules, an alcoholic cocktail typically served in a copper mug, has led to inquiries regarding the safe use of copper mugs and this beverage,” it reads. “The use of copper and copper alloys as a food contact surface is limited in Iowa.”

If you’re hesitant to put your Moscow Mule obsession to bed, there are ways to enjoy the drink safely without sacrificing the classic look. When stocking your bar at home, make sure to include copper mugs lined with food-safe metal like nickel or stainless steel. And when you’re ordering the drink elsewhere, you can check with the bartender to see if they have similar containers. If not, asking for the drink in a boring old glass is your safest bet.